


In Five Years' Time

by UnderABurrOakTree



Category: Captain Marvel - Fandom, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, endgame spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-28 21:23:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18764515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnderABurrOakTree/pseuds/UnderABurrOakTree
Summary: Thanos snapped and Carol lost. It's a long five years.





	In Five Years' Time

She’s chewing the last dry bite of biscuit fresh from the small stock of human adjacent food that the Skrulls keep for her in the kitchen when she feels it. It’s a warm wave through her body, not unlike what it feels like every time she lets the fire consume her before she throws herself up and away. As it passes she sits up, alarmed, and jerks her head up. Soren, sitting across from her, stumbles as she tries to stand from the table. “Something’s wrong.” Soren says, as she tilts her head back, dissolving into dust.

“What the f-,” says Carol, as she’s interrupted by sudden blaring throughout the base. Looking quickly to her right, she stands and starts running, trying to run to where the conference room and Talos are. She sprints through the retracting doors, and turns a corner, when she runs into another being.

“Carol. What is this? Where is Soren?” Talos says, tightly grasping on to Carol’s right forearm.

Carol shakes her head. “I’m sorry. She’s gone. I don’t-.” Carol looks down. Her communicator on her left forearm is blinking, short-short-short, long-long-long, short-short-short, and her heart plummets. Earth. Talos has turned gray, his blood receding from his face.

“Thanos.”

* * *

 

It takes fifteen days and thirty-six jumps to reach Earth from the new Skrull base. Carol stops every third planet in order to try and link up her communicator to send or receive messages from Earth. She has the communicator set to send out the same message every two minutes, _Are you safe? On my way_. There’s been no reply. By the seventh day, Carol knows. She can feel in the pit of her stomach that they are gone. That Fury would have followed up his emergency page, that Maria and Monica would have sent word, but there’s been nothing.

She asks if communications are working at every stop, hoping against hope that there’s just some problem in relays, that there has been some interplanetary error that is blocking her from getting replies. The first few days, all the communications were jammed with panicked families and systems desperately trying to hear a message contradicting their deepest fears. Those issues have mostly cleared now. All the communication infrastructure has been up for the past twenty planets. At some of the planets she notes disturbances to check on once she finds Maria working on yet another prop in her workshop, and Monica wryly answering the phone, asking why her Ma is so worried about her for no good reason.

As she flies jump after jump, planet after planet, she hears whispers about her presence. “What’s Captain Marvel doing here? It’s too fuckin’ late.” says a Xandarian, drunk off their ass and seated at the bar. No one will meet their eye. Everyone has heard now what happened to Xandar, how Thanos tore through and burned it to the ground, his army lining up and splitting the Xandarians apart, leaving half dead, fifty thousand at a time. Carol feels bile rising up, burning her throat. She turns and walks out of the bar. Her eyes burn as she lets the fire consume her and she arcs up, back into the cold desolation of space. Two jumps left.

* * *

The warmth of entering Earth’s atmosphere feels constricting. Normally, Carol welcomes the heat of returning home, but today it’s suffocating, like trying to breathe with a blanket over her nose and mouth during those cold desert nights at Pegasus. She flashes through the low cloud cover too fast but she doesn’t give a shit. She slams to the ground and feels the force shoot into her back and knees as a welcome sudden pressure compared to the numbness she feels. Hearing metallic groaning, she looks right and sees a plane in the workshop tip back and forth with the force of her entry, and she hears something in the house break.

Sprinting, Carol runs up the three steps of the porch and flings open the screen door. There she sees a beer glass, broken on the floor. She reaches down with her gloved hand to pick up the warm bottom half of the bottle and lets out a sob. She looks up and sees that the television is on, playing the title screen of the old Star Trek DVDs that Monica loves to watch when she visits her parents, even now in her thirties. Carol walks over to the remote on the arm of the couch and turns the television off. The image stays burned into the screen. She sits down on the couch, now sobbing as she admits to herself what she and all the people she saw on her long journey here have already known. They’re gone. Half are gone. She clinches her fist and hears the rest of the glass break. She feels nothing.

It’s dark when Carol grabs the necklace from the sock drawer in their bedroom upstairs and places it around her neck. As she reaches up and tucks the golden band into the neck of her suit, she can feel its coldness pressing into the dip above her sternum. She grabs the key sitting in the ceramic cup on the dresser and goes back downstairs. Reaching down, she picks up the larger shards of grass and places them in the trash can under the sink. She then grabs the broom that they keep next to the washing machine and sweeps up the glistening smaller brown pieces that are ready to stab into someone’s unsuspecting foot. When she walks back from putting away the broom and sees a note pad and pen she quickly jots down, _Going to NY. Please call me. Love, -C_ , and places it under a NASA magnet on the fridge. Her lip trembles and a tear falls, but she doesn’t have time to worry about that now. She exits the front door into the humid night air, locking it behind her and tucks the key into a pocket along her belt.

* * *

It has been nearly three years since Fury described the Avengers compound to her in his dimly lit apartment. He had rolled his eye as he talked about Stark’s unwillingness to learn from the gleaming ostentation of the Triskellion, mumbling about his arrogance and how steel boxes didn’t even make for interesting architecture. When Carol had reminded him at the time that Stark was bankrolling the compound, Fury had waved his hand saying “Yeah, Yeah”. Now she stands at the front door of the hangar, opening it and looking in the dark cavernous expanse of the building. She notices a light on in a series of rooms in the back on the second floor. Quietly, she finds some stairs and climbs them, silently pushing open a door. There, thirty yards in front of her she sees some of the Avengers huddled. She can hear them arguing back and forth as she approaches, and stops as she hears Romanoff say “I want to know who’s on the other end of that thing.” Romanoff turns and Carol can feel the urgency of the past fifteen days, her lost family, and thousands of light years in her as she demands “Where is Fury?”

**Author's Note:**

> Long time listener, first time caller! Let me know what you think. This will continue on with a chapter per year, and maybe an epilogue.  
> I'll add characters as Carol meets them.  
> Trying to update this on a weekly basis, as able.


End file.
